


Things Already Seen

by bratfarrar



Series: Things Already Seen [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:47:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bratfarrar/pseuds/bratfarrar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Teyla runs like some avenging gazelle, all focused fear and fury and grace, and John flies after her as though he can outrun past and future, ignoring the rocks and plants and all the memories that haven't happened yet.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Already Seen

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by the [sga_flashfic](http://sga_flashfic.livejournal.com) "second verse" challenge.

Four steps into Atlantis ( _alien city, alien world_ , he reminds himself, and then wishes he hadn’t, because they’re not the only things that are alien), the lights come on—the _city_ comes on, and suddenly he’s not alone in his head anymore.

Suddenly his head isn’t his anymore.

Well, it is—he’s still John Sheppard, still has all his memories of Antarctica and Afghanistan, and the places before those, but—

But he also remembers the feel of the city, knows what’s hidden behind the doors: the hallways and the rooms beyond, the catwalks, the piers, the balconies, the puddle jumpers. Knows all the ways a man can die here. (Has died, does die—except none of it has happened yet, maybe none of it has to happen—)

Marines push past him, loaded down with supplies. John can name them, name all the ways they sacrifice themselves or are sacrificed. He’s written letters that will never get sent to their families, full of stiff phrases that only ever approach the truth; even if the expedition wasn’t classified, he still wouldn’t have the right words to make people understand what these men have done.

Haven’t done. Might yet do. They’re alive, not dead ( _not yet, not real_ , he tries to remind himself, but it doesn’t work, because the thought _different time line_ makes him feel like he’s been gutted), and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

He’s in the way, and beginning to draw people’s eyes away from this strange (familiar) new (old) city, which deserves their attention more than he ever could, so he steps aside, and keeps on stepping up the stairs to the control room. (He shouldn’t know that. Shouldn’t know the way it had looked—will look—with the dust covers replaced by laptops.)

Rodney (not Rodney, _McKay_ —they aren’t friends, aren’t team yet, and John can’t let himself forget that or everything (John) will fall apart) follows on John’s heels. More lights come on, even as John tries to persuade them to stay off, and then various consoles and screens as Ro— _McKay_ pulls the dust covers off. McKay makes a sound that is somehow both thrilled and irritated at the same time as something new blinks to life.

“Are you turning these on?” he demands, and John just shakes his head because he doesn’t trust himself to speak. “If you are, stop it. For all we know, this could be the city arming itself for self-destruct, all because you weren’t able to keep from playing light switch, and I did not come all this way just to die because some idiot pushed the wrong mental button.” He sounds exactly the way John remembers (knows) him, though at this moment it’s hard to see the two of them on the same team, as friends—and not just them, but Ford, as much as rank allowed, and Teyla (and he can’t let himself think of her, not yet—)

John knows exactly what each of the consoles controls, and the basics of how to read and manipulate them, but he can’t tell Rodney this, just as he can’t tell Rodney about the thousands of feet of water above their heads, or that Rodney’s already died once—and oh, John hopes that this isn’t the time line where they all drown.

“Cat got your tongue?” McKay asks, but he’s too distracted by all the Ancient tech for the question to have much bite to it.

“Nope,” John says, and he shouldn’t be able to sound as normal as he does. “Just feeling a little overwhelmed.” Which is true, just not the way Rodney will think. _McKay_ , John reminds himself again with something close to despair.

He can’t do this, can’t pretend to be the man he was (should be) a year ago (now). But he has no choice; if he starts spouting things, if he tells this Rodney (McKay, because that’s all they are to each other in this now) everything he knows, he’ll likely find himself trussed up in a corner until things get settled, and if that happens, people will die (again), and he can’t let that happen. So he trails behind Rodney, clutching his P-90 as if it’s all that’s keeping him tethered to reality, and tries to remember what it felt like to be innocent of the future.

Apparently he does a good enough job of impersonating himself, because no one seems to think he’s anything other than mildly freaked by the whole “alien city, alien world” thing—and then, later, by the “we’re underwater and our shields are failing” thing. He almost, _almost_ hits the button to send Atlantis upward, but they need a reason to go to Athos, to meet Teyla.

Maybe he’s being selfish, but he tells himself that the expedition needs (will need) the Athosians almost as much as John needs Teyla right now. He needs Teyla to look at him gravely, to touch her forehead to his, to help him believe that he is more than he has been. That he can do this. And the expedition will need good allies if they are to survive long enough to figure out a way to go home, for home to figure out a way to get to them—Colonel Everett said (will say) that there was (will be) a space ship on the way. They just need to hang on for a year.

John just needs to hang on for a year.

So he lets Atlantis stay where she is, with the shields running out of power, and Colonel Sumner takes him to Athos, where he meets Teyla for the second time.

“Nice to meet you,” he forces himself to say, even though all he wants to do is grab her arms and hold on, to say _I don’t know why I’m here, now_ , and have her tell him that things will be all right. But she looks at him without recognition, and it’s worse than Rodney thinking he’s an idiot.

“We do not trade with strangers,” she tells them, and he hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.

“Then we’ll just have to get to know each other,” he says, because he can’t make it through the year without her. “Me, I like Ferris wheels and college football and anything that goes more than two hundred miles per hour.” She doesn’t know any of these things, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll have time to explain them badly later. If things go the same way as last time.

And Teyla smiles, and invites them for tea, and John knows that he can do this. He can fix things, can save the Athosians and Colonel Sumner. Can keep from waking the wraith and making all the hundreds of other mistakes. This time, he can make things go right.

“I love a good cup of tea,” he says, even though he doesn’t, and it feels like he could fly.

* * *

The euphoria sticks with him all the way through the Athosian’s foul tea (it tastes like bark boiled in mud, not that he’s ever—would tell them that) and accompanying small-talk, the brief and almost painful dawn, and the trek out to Teyla’s cave paintings; this time, although still not quite able to match Teyla’s goat-like sure-footedness, he manages to keep within a few strides of her, doesn't fall down on his ass.

It feels a little like he’s cheating: he remembers every instance, almost every word before it happens, like a prescient echo or two realities just slightly out of phase. And he knows now that Halling loves kids and basket weaving and can drop a near-deer from a hundred feet with sling and stone, that Teyla’s small frame masks the ability to kill gracefully and without apology and that she would protect every innocent from the Wraith if she could. Knows that Jinto and the other Athosian children prefer football and oatmeal cookies and stories like the ones John’s mother used to tell him, about bravery and cleverness and the bad guys defeated.

He’s a ringer in their midst, a seeming stranger to knows them like family, and he would feel guilt if he weren’t trying to give them a better future than the one they had before---a future that might not have him in it, but he can’t (won’t) think that far ahead right now.

So he drinks the tea without grimace or hesitation (a skill quickly and bitterly won the first time on this merry-go-round) and makes jokes he knows they won’t understand, smiles and charms and tap-dances his way through the conversation with all the confidence of Gene Kelly on screen, gains their trust because he already has it.

When they reach the caves it’s easy enough to find Teyla’s necklace by stepping on it, although he doesn't realize what he's choosing to do until it's done; the sudden crack of the crystal breaking startles them both.

He pulls it out from under his boot heel, cutting himself on an unexpected sharp edge. “Ow,” he says, instead of What’s this, as he’s supposed to, and jams his bleeding finger into his mouth.

But Teyla gasps in delight anyway, says, “That’s mine, where did you find it?”

He hands the necklace to her carefully, removes the finger from his mouth and gives her a wry smile. “Stepped on it, actually. Sorry about that. Hope you won’t take it as a bad omen.”

It’s meant mostly as a joke, but Teyla answers seriously. “Of course not: something lost was returned. I never hoped to see this again—the damage does not matter. You did not step on it intentionally.” She touches the pendant gently with one finger, as if half-expecting it to dissolve into nothing, and then tucks into a pocket.

Before, John had fastened it around her neck; before, she’d been a stranger and he’d been trying his hardest to win her favor, or at least her people’s assistance. This time he deliberately broke something she held dear; this time she is Teyla, whose heart he holds more dear than his own, for whom he has bent oaths and risked his life. He would make her hate him if it meant she and her people would stay safe.

If it wouldn’t mean sacrificing Atlantis’s chance of survival.

When he looks around at the cave paintings he see only everyone he failed the first time, and for a moment he is heart-stoppingly grateful for a chance to do it right; grateful, and utterly, utterly terrified that he’ll just make things worse.

“So this is what the Wraith do,” he hears himself say, grim instead of flippant as he ought to be. “Destroy cities. They why you guys live in tents in the middle of a forest?”

“Yes.” She sounds half-surprised that he drew the conclusion so quickly, something he’ll have to guard against in the future. “They return often enough to cull us that we long ago ceased rebuilding. It is better run and hide and live as best we can despite them.” There is bitterness in her voice that he doesn’t remember, although maybe he just couldn’t hear it before, wouldn’t have understood. “A few of us can tell when they are coming. It helps, but not enough.”

John wants to reach out to her, to lay a hand on her arm and tell her that it is enough, that she’s enough and no one could ask for more, but he never could lie to her. Instead he presses his palms against the body of his P-90 and glances away, stares at the paintings as if to burn them into his memory.

“We should go,” Teyla says abruptly, sounding suddenly strange and distant. “It will be dark soon.”

‘It will be dark soon’, only in John’s ears it rings as ‘The wraith are coming’, because they’d never determined what exactly had caused the original raid on Athos—whether it was mere bad luck, or the unintentional activation of Teyla’s necklace. He’d taken care of the latter (he hoped), but. . . .

He wants to run back to the encampment, but can’t, constrained by the murkiness of light and a loose grasp of time-paradoxes as taught by Hollywood. “So what do the wraith do, exactly?” he asks, because it’s either talk or panic and one of those options is unacceptable.

“Feed off us. Treat us like _cattin_.” John’s seen cattin—they’re pretty much big, stupid, blue rabbits that’re bred on a couple planets for meat and leather. It’s not a flattering comparison, or one he’s heard Teyla make before, though it’s certainly accurate.

“Okay, yes—I got that part, but how do they do that? Are they big slime monsters or what?” Slime monsters would be easier to deal with: just find the equivalent of salt for slugs and voila! Problem solved.

“Ah. No, they are shaped much as we are, but they are taller and very strong and do not die when they should. And if they touch you, they can drink away your life so that you die as an old man while still young.”

“Vampires. Great. Does driving a stake through their heart work?” It’s a stupid remark and an even more stupid question, but at the back of his mind there’s a clock ticking down to zero and he can’t remember who he was a year ago, who Teyla was, how they fit together. 

“I doubt anyone has ever made the attempt.” She sounds almost amused, though, so perhaps it was the right thing to say after all. “It is . . . safer not to fight, although we do, when necessary.”

“‘Safer’. Can’t see how that’d be true.” Another stupid comment, and he’s over-playing his hand and he can’t _remember_. . . .

But Teyla answers evenly, as if he’s not an ignorant stranger spouting inanities. 

“They have enormous ships that can fly, and if a world makes too much trouble. . . . They destroyed Sateda a few years ago, and they had guns that looked like your and their own ships that could fly.”

“Oh.” Sateda? The name’s only vaguely familiar, and he wonders briefly if he’d just forgotten it or if they’d never asked the right set of questions before. “So they fly, eat people, and you can’t kill them. Terrific. Any more bad news you’d like to share?”

“They can make you see things that are not really there.” And bingo, that’s what he’s been (ineptly, fumblingly) fishing for.

“Great. Just great.” He tries his radio, and lo and behold, he’s back in range. “Colonel Sumner? Sir, I’ve got some wonderful news you’re going to want to hear about.”

“Let me guess, Sheppard—you found about the local bogeymen.” Sumner sounds impatient and sarcastic and _alive_ , and maybe this time John can keep him that way.

“Yes sir. Except I don’t think they’re actually either—local or bogeymen, that is. Teyla showed me records of entire cities being destroyed by them, and apparently they have spaceships and the ability to make people hallucinate.” And scoopy-beams, he doesn’t say, although he wants to. But Teyla hadn’t mentioned those and he doesn’t know how to ask without being obvious. More obvious.

The radio is silent long enough for John to start panicking in the very secret and somewhat irrational parts of his head, but eventually Sumner replies, sounding unexpectedly tired. “Of course they’re real and have spaceships. Do they have teleporters as well?”

John blinks at the unexpected salvation. “I don’t know, sir, but I’ll ask.”

“No need—I can find out from my end. Just get back here ASAP.”

“Will do, sir.” It’s funny, but the last time (first time, real time) John can remember using the honorific only when required and only in a way sure to emphasis that he was choosing to use it. Now, though. . . . Maybe it’s a holdover from all the dreams he’s had in the future of Sumner judging his performance and finding it lacking and John unable to disagree—Sumner was (is) a tight-ass, but he probably would have avoided most of John’s biggest blunders.

(Sometimes it feels like they all walked into the Pegasus galaxy and went stupid.)

In the dim light Teyla regards him with an expression somewhere between disbelief and hope. “There are truly no Wraith where you come from?”

“That’s right, though we’ve got our own monsters and lots of them.” Alien as well as human, according to the seemingly endless training videos he probably should have paid more attention to. “They just have different ways of screwing us over.” Teyla silently mouths the last four words, forehead furrowed slightly. “Of hurting us.” He’s going to have to teach Teyla American idioms all over again.

“I understand,” Teyla says, puzzlement fading. “Although I find it hard to believe that anything could be worse than the Wraith.”

“Compared to some things, being eaten’s a mercy.” Not many, but having an alien attach itself to your brainstem and use you like a puppet for pretty much forever? Oh yeah. John’s had (had had?) nightmares about that ever since he saw the footage of someone being taken over—supposedly willingly, but he didn’t buy it. Who would volunteer for that?

“Is that why you came here?” She sounds dubious and John can’t blame her. He’d be dubious too, after spending any length of time here.

And then, just as he begins to relax, to think that maybe he’d pulled it off and they’re home free (and the potential consequences of that are dizzying), Teyla freezes beside him.

“ _Wraith_ ,” she hisses, and of course the Wraith are showing up, because that’s what the universe likes to do: dangle the possibility of happiness, of a good thing in front of John’s nose long enough for him to think it’ll actually happen, only to yank it away (or demolish, tear or burn) irrevocably.

“Sir, Teyla says there’s wraith,” he spits into his radio, even as he feels the panic peel away from him like a shed skin: the worst is happening, so all that’s left to him is to deal with it. (And this is the thing that Elizabeth never understood, not really—when the shit finally hits the fan, you clean it up. You don’t talk about if/when/why.

—Which is unfair to her, he knows, but not all that much.)

“Confirm that; we’ve got three hostiles inbound. Major, get your butt down here _now_.”

“Yes _sir_.”

And suddenly time, which was already behaving oddly, begins to stretch and twist like taffy and get stuck in John’s mental teeth, which isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. (This has happened before, twice, and people died—will die? had died?—and all John wants is his head back, his ability to think and act and not be paralyzed by all the possibilities that narrow down to one inevitability that can’t be inevitable because John won’t let it.) The surrounding trees seem to shift slightly, blocking all the ways to where John needs to be this instant.

Teyla runs like some avenging gazelle, all focused fear and fury and grace, and John flies after her as though he can outrun past and future, ignoring the rocks and plants and all the memories that haven’t happened yet. Won’t happen. He wants to scream into his radio, but he’s too breathless to do it.

“Sir?” he gasps, and then “Ford?” when he gets no reply to the first query. “Ford!” A bush throws itself in front of him just as the first dart whines overhead and the one thing he hadn’t yet considered was the possibility that maybe he might not have the chance to save everyone. But he leaps over the bush and throws himself through the Wraith that hasn’t actually jumped out of the undergrowth and yells into his radio because he’ll have time to breathe later, when everyone’s still alive.

“Shoot at the ships—the Wraith on the ground aren’t real. Focus on the ships! And have someone watch the gate. When they leave, I want to know where they’re going.”

Something spasms along his ribcage, a painful reminder that this isn’t the body that spent a year training with Teyla and the Marines and tramping around the Pegasus galaxy.

Perhaps he’ll have to breathe now after all.

“Ford! Report!”

Perhaps not.

He steps where there isn’t any ground, falling and rolling back to his feet almost without noticing, too intent on maintaining forward momentum to notice the sting of torn palms, or the scoopy-beam that flits by an arm’s-length from where he’d been.

It’s Colonel Sumner who responds, sounding admirably composed for someone being attacked by alien vampires. “We’ve got one hostile down—Bates is lining up a shot on the second. Ford is guarding the gate. No casualties yet. What’s your situation, Major?”

And even as he opens his mouth to gasp an answer in a tone that suggests _I’m not trying to usurp your authority, sir_ as much as possible, Teyla’s snagged from in front of him, gone before he can even twitch a finger to help.

So he says “Just lost Teyla,” and tries not to sound as forlorn as he feels and continues sprinting. Tick tock goes the clock in his head, and if Sumner isn’t there to distract the queen, maybe Teyla will be the one asking for the mercy shot and that will not happen. It won’t. “Sir, we have to—”

He’s cut off by a sudden nothing on the radio, a true silence where there should have been only a mechanical one. If he were breathing, he’d curse until the air around him was scorched and blue, but his lungs are as empty as his head seems to be of anything useful—

He swallows and runs and does not think of Teyla’s eyes glazed and blank and a hundred years too young.

* * *

“Sir, we’ve lost the Colonel!”

For one brief, blinding moment he considers just lying down and giving up, because maybe the future is fixed, and if it is, he can’t go through it again. (“Sure, _that’s_ logical,” Rodney would sneer, but John’s so very tired of having the football yanked away at the last second every. single. damn. time.) But his legs keep going long enough for duty to claw its way back to the top of the mental heap because really, there’s no choice here, same as always.

(This is the thing no one ever understands: there’s never a choice, no matter how much it looks like one.)

“Ford, you hear that? We have friendlies aboard the bogeys—let’em go, but make sure you get the gate address for where they’re going. Write it on the back of Jensen’s head if you have to, but _get the address_.” Because anything that will speed up the rescue mission is a good thing, and Jensen’s dignity is a small price to pay.

“Yes sir,” Ford says, just the slightest suggestion of confusion in his voice, and John wonders briefly if Jensen’s name is one of those things he shouldn’t know, but that’s not important at the moment. “Should we go after them when they leave?”

John has a sudden, horrifying image of Ford and his men ( _John’s_ men) dying in vacuum, and his “Negative, lieutenant,” comes out as an unintended snarl because he can’t let Ford even entertain the possibility. Losing him at this point would break something inside John, which is a selfish way of thinking about it, but right now he really doesn’t care.

And then he skids around a tree and down a hill and the Athosian camp is _on fire_ and how had he forgotten about that? (Well, okay, probably pretty easily, given everything else, but still. If he’d forgotten that, how much else had slipped away from him, and was continuing to do so, even now?)

The hand crawling along the ground toward him, though—that, he definitely remembered.

Two shots, a tearful Jinto, helping the Athosians salvage as much from the wreckage of the camp as quickly as possible: it’s deja vu, for real, and by the time they all tumble through the gate into Atlantis, John’s beginning to feel like he’s stuck in a rerun. But he’s not, he knows, because Elizabeth’s reaction is “We’re considering leaving the city,” not 'we’re leaving, now,' so at the very least he’s managed to snag himself a little more time to work out a rescue.

And he has the Athosians now, has his (potential) allies, has Teyla (he does, he does); there’s no reason for them to stay underwater any longer, so he thinks _Up. Up up up up up_ , until he finally manages to hit some virtual button and Atlantis begins to shudder around them, shaking him off his feet so that he sprawls (gratefully) onto the floor. _Thank you_ , he tells the unthinking mechanical brain that controls the city, as people shout and cry and gasp at the seeming cataclysm.

The floor feels oddly warm beneath him.

But he can’t stay there, can’t rest. Not yet. No matter how much he wants to simply lay his weary head down (and how long has he been awake, now? Feels like days, although for this iteration of himself it must be only hours still. Is there a jet-lag equivalent for time-travel?), there’s work to be done, so he forces himself to stand back up and take stock.

Okay. He can do this: he already knows what stipulations Elizabeth’s going to make, and he knows how to meet them, and the thing is, she’s right to make them. So he just needs to figure out how to get someone to tell him about the puddle jumpers more quickly than last time—just like with Teyla, only hopefully this attempt will go better than the previous one. 

It will go better, even if he has to play Rambo to make it happen.

But he shouldn’t have to. “Ford, you still have that address?”

“Yes sir! Used Jensen’s arm instead of his head, though. Figured there was less chance of it smudging.”

Well, that’s twenty minutes saved.

“Right. Jensen, find whoever’s in charge of stargate stuff, and get that address into the computer or whatever. Ford, you’re in charge of getting everyone out of here and somewhere a little more convenient. Keep a couple of Marines to help you with that. The rest of you, grab a scientist and go looking for stuff that might give us a tactical advantage.”

Stackhouse, who’s currently helping Charin to her feet, looks over at John dubiously. “Like what, sir?”

John mentally pokes Atlantis and the gateroom’s lights flare momentarily, prompting gasps from the Athosians and unhappy twitches from the Marines. “It’s an ancient alien city. There’s gotta be flying cars or spaceships or something somewhere.”

“Or big-ass guns,” another Marine—Markham?—suggests hopefully, and then they scatter and John goes up to sweet-talk Elizabeth.

There’s not panic in the halls, not quite, but everyone he passes is flushed, flustered, on the verge of hysteria or euphoria. Rodney, when he gives his report, manages to sound simultaneously thrilled that they still have juice in the ZPM and pissed that there’s not enough to do anything more than last-ditch defensive measures. John wants to make a flippant remark about how he’s sure there’s an instruction manual, but given that a year’s-worth of hard searching hadn’t turned up anything usable, that doesn’t really seem fair. So he holds his tongue and waits for the time to make his pitch.

“How long before we can send a MALP through to check out the address Ford got?” he asks Rodney first, because he can feel in his bones how necessary it is that this be his mission, his rescue. He can’t afford to give away any more control of it than what Elizabeth requires to sign off on it.

Rodney looks disgruntled, clearly caught flat-footed. “That’s really more Zalinsky’s field than mine.” 

“Zelenka,” Elizabeth corrects, faintly bemused at Rodney and clearly irked at John.

“Well, I’m sure your supervision would help speed things up,” John tells him, half truth, half lie, half blatant flattery; he remembers that much of Rodney in the early days. The later days, too, although by then it had become less flattery and more reassurance.

Rodney sent off, Elizabeth turns to John, frustration evident in every line of her body, the hard quirk of her mouth. “Major, a word.”

Meek and mild, he follows her outside, and doesn’t let her see how much her moment of startled wonderment at this new world hurts him. He doesn’t think he’d seen it before, when he’d been overwhelmed by the alienness of Atlantis, the weird itching sensation inside his scalp that he now knows is the mainframe trying and failing to upgrade his access to it. But now he’s jaded, and to see her still so fresh cuts at him.

His wounds don’t matter, though, not now, and especially not when they’re only imaginary. So he boxes away that part of himself and sets in on the task at hand.

“Ma’am,” he says, even though the word tastes like something bitter, something lost, because he has to make her understand the urgency of his request and the sobriety with which he makes it.

She looks shocked by the honorific, but that gives him a chance to make his case. “I understand the risks of a rescue mission, and how little we can afford to lose anyone else.” (And he sounds like someone other than himself, but that’s okay, that’s necessary—he wasn’t sufficient to get everyone home the first time, so if he has to become someone else, he will, and won’t count the cost until everything’s over and he knows how much blood is on his hands this time.) “But we also cannot afford to leave our people in the hands of technologically-advanced hostiles, particularly ones that apparently feed on humans.”

That shakes her even more, but she continues on anyway. “Do we know they’re hostile? Perhaps this is some kind of misunderstanding—”

“They eat people,” he repeats flatly, because she isn’t that naive, just unwilling to accept how dire the situation really is. And how could he blame her? Atlantis is the end of the rainbow, and everyone expected to find the pot of gold, not a man-eating troll. “Teyla and the other Athosians were quite clear on that.”

But this just earns him another grimace. “That’s something else we need to talk about—how do we know we can trust them? For all we know, they could be lying through their teeth and you just got caught in the middle of a private feud. Or maybe one of them called these Wraith in on you.” For a moment John wants nothing more than to punch her square in the nose, because Teyla—the Athosians—they never—

He takes a ragged breath and reminds himself of when he is, of who he’s speaking to. “If you could call cattle being slaughtered a feud, or think it's likely that someone would allow their home to be utterly destroyed simply because of some random people that wandered in for a chat. Ma’am,” and this is easier if he thinks of her as a superior to be persuaded, not the almost-friend she’d become, “the Athosians were clearly shocked that we had never heard of the Wraith, and just as clearly didn’t think there was anything to be gained by defending themselves. They _warned_ us about the Wraith.”

“All right,” Elizabeth says, looking slightly taken aback by the force and extent of his reply. “So we give them a place to stay for the moment. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in no position to mount a rescue mission. We have no information, limited resources, and for all we know, there’s no one left to rescue.”

The breeze blowing in across the empty city smells ever so faintly of brine and ancient mental, like memories and hope. The brush of it against John’s skin comes like a warning to be patient: push too hard, too soon, and he might ruin his chances to change anything for the better, might accidentally change everything for the worse.

So he tilts his head in seeming agreement and does not argue. “I’m hoping Rodney can get some usable info on the address Ford copied down, and my men are currently hunting for anything that might be useful in a covert rescue attempt—scientists in tow, of course.” Elizabeth looks at him oddly when he says this ( _McKay_ , he chastises himself), but he can’t interpret her expression.

“Very well, Major. But until you do have sufficient information and some kind of tactical advantage such that your rescue attempt won’t actually be a suicide mission, I will not authorize any offworld activity.”

“ _Any_ offworld activity?” John repeats, surprised aback by her vehemence. Elizabeth colors slightly.

“Beyond what’s necessary for the continued survival of this expedition.”

“Ah,” John says, and doesn’t point out the loophole. Instead, he radios Ford to ask the Athosians’ current location, and then walks Elizabeth over to meet her first set of allies. Both parties seem to make a good impression on each other, so John leaves them to it and snags Ford on his way out.

“You know the troops better than I do,” he begins, a lie that would’ve been true if his life hadn’t started working like a video game. “If you needed to put together a team for covert prisoner extraction, who would you pick?”

Ford visibly brightens at this, and from the speed with which he launches into his answer, he’s been playing with the idea ever since they got back to the city. And most of his suggestions are sound, although Markham (who has just enough of a gene marker to fly the puddle jumpers without the aid of modern medicine) will have to be switched in as copilot, and one person will have to be switched out: Ford.

John looks at Ford’s shining face and remembers all their missions together and knows it must needs be done, but he can’t quite force the words out yet. Not now. So he settles for “Sounds good, Lieutenant,” and leaves it at that. Maybe he’ll regret it later, maybe not. There’s still plenty of time for everything to fall apart around his ears regardless of how he handles this small matter.


End file.
